Why There Is a 9/11 Truth Movement
In the third year after 9/11, the U.S. government still has not answered the most important questions about what really happened. And the official 9/11 Commission has failed to ask.
Fighter planes were not dispatched in a timely manner to intercept the 9/11 flights - in blatant
violation of longstanding, standard operating procedures. Why? Why did the U.S. chain of
command (Bush, Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers) by their own admission remain inactive during the
actual attacks? On the morning of Sept. 11 itself, the U.S. military conducted scheduled
wargames to rehearse scenarios that included plane hijackings and an "errant aircraft" crashing
into a government building (AP, Aug. 2002). Even granted this was a coincidence: How can
high officials like Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld get away with testifying that "no one
could have imagined" planes would be used as weapons against buildings? Why won't the government identify who made profits by short-selling the stock of United Airlines, American
Airlines and the WTC re-insurers in the week before the attacks? Where did the many known
advance warnings of the attacks originate? Were these warnings really missed?
The Kean Commission (the official 9/11 investigation currently making headlines) was called
to life only after Sept. 11th families lobbied stubbornly for 14 months. The same families have
now demanded the resignation of the Commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, for his
evident conflicts of interest. Although Zelikow frames the Commission's agenda, he was on the
Bush 2000 transition team, worked closely with Condoleeza Rice under both Bushes, and coauthored a book with Rice in 1999. Why hasn't this story made the headlines?
For millions of people around the world, the timing and convenience of 9/11 gave rise to dark
suspicions about the true origins of the attacks. These were fed by a level of government
stonewalling that can be described only as a cover-up.
The terror of September 11th, 2001 gave the holders of power in the U.S. a pretext to redefine
the world - to roll back the unalienable rights of American citizens - to shift trillions from butter to guns - to launch a perpetual "war on terror" - and to go ahead with invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan that had been planned years before 2001.
Now, in the third year after the crime, a 9/11 Truth movement has risen in the United States
and across the globe. It aims to take the dangerous ideological weapon of 9/11 out of the hands
of those who have abused it - and to open the door to the hidden truths of U.S. and world politics. For too long, we have allowed the government to operate in the shadows. What has it
been doing, in our name?
How can you rule yourself, when you don't know where you stand? Democracy is impossible
without an informed populace. The time for merely demanding disclosure about what really
happened on Sept. 11, 2001 has passed. The government has refused to provide answers and
engaged in a whitewash. Now it is up to the people take responsibility and face what really happened on September 11, 2001.
â&#x20AC;&#x201C; THE EDITORS - NY 9/11 TRUTH
www.ny911truth.org

“Scamming America”
The Official 9/11 Cover-up Guide
Published on the occasion of
The Kean Commission Hearings at The New School University
New York City, May 18-19, 2004
by NY 9/11 TRUTH

TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Kean Commission and the Sept. 11th Families .......................................2
The Rice/Zelikow Connection .......................................................................6
A brief history of the Kean Commission and its conflicts of interest

The Total Failure of the Kean Commission .................................................11
Case study: How the Commission went easy on Rumsfeld, Myers and Wolfowitz

“Bush is scamming America.”
“As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more
about these terrorists before September 11 than it has ever admitted.”
“Let’s chase this rabbit into the ground here. They had a plan to go to war
and when 9/11 happened that's what they did; they went to war.”
-Former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland
who resigned from the Kean Commission in November 2003
1

THE 9/11 COVER-UP

MAY 18, 2004

The Kean Commission and the
September 11th Families
NEW YORK CITY — The Kean
Commission was called to life in Nov. 2002,
when the White House dropped its objections
to an independent 9/11 investigation, after
many months of persistent lobbying by
September 11th families. At the time, this
was seen as a victory for the relatives of those
killed on September 11th, and for their allies
in the fight for open government and
accountability.

September 2001, the story of the Bin Laden
family airlift was denigrated as urban legend
until April, when former White House terror
adviser Richard Clarke and Secretary of State
Colin Powell both confirmed it.
How many other confirmations of “urban
legend” are still in store?

Accountability and the Theory of Luck

As the Kean Commission nears the end of its
work, it is informative to ask what those families are saying today.

“Why has no one in any level of our government been held accountable for the countless
failures leading up to and on 9/11?”

23 Questions to Bush

The 23 questions are from the Family
Steering Commitee, twelve September 11 relatives who represent many other 9/11 family
groups. Since November 2002, they have
monitored the 9/11 Commission headed by
former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean.

“Mr. Bush, who approved the flight of the bin
Laden family out of the United States, when
all commercial flights were grounded?”
That is one of 23 explosive questions that
George W. Bush and his subordinates must
face in public testimony, under oath and pain
of perjury—that is, if leaders of September 11
family groups get their way.

Members of the FSC were key lobbyists in
gaining an independent investigation of
September 11. Mindy Kleinberg, known as
one of the four “Jersey Wives,” testified to
the Kean Commission during its first public
proceedings in early 2003. She alerted the
panel to disturbing gaps and contradictions in
the government’s story of what happened on
September 11. Her comments challenged the
idea that all anomalies in the official story are
due to incompetence or coincidence. She
called that “the theory of luck.”

The question refers to private flights for
Saudi royalty, cleared by the White House
during the otherwise total civilian flight ban
in the days immediately after September 11.
Members of the Bin Laden clan, including
two of Osama Bin Laden’s many brothers,
were allowed to leave the United States
before federal investigators had a chance to
question them.1

“Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not
monitored?” Kleinberg asked. She was referring to the widespread reports of possible
insider trading in the week before September

Despite confirmed reports dating back to

1

Shafig bin Laden, Osama’s older brother, had been in Washington on the morning of September 11 for the
annual meeting of the Carlyle Group, the fund that until that October tied Bush family interests to the Bin
Laden family fortune.

2

11 indicating specific prior knowledge of the
attacks.2

www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing1/witness_kleinberg.htm

“To me luck is something
that happens once. When you
have this repeated pattern of
broken protocols, broken
laws, broken communication,
one cannot still call it luck.”

A Lesson in Reading
The families threw down their challenge to
Bush last February, following reports that the
Kean Commission had asked Bush and Bill
Clinton to testify. Only in May did Bush
finally appear before the panel, in a closed
session at the Oval Office. No transcript was
taken. Bush assented to the hearing on the
condition that he testify together with Dick
Cheney, who apparently did most of the talking. Based on the handful of public statements about their joint appearance, it seems
doubtful that the panel confronted Bush with
this question:

-Mindy Kleinberg
9/11 Families Steering Committee

Kleinberg: “Is it luck when 15 visas are
awarded based on incomplete forms? Is it
luck when Airline Security screenings allow
hijackers to board planes with box cutters and
pepper spray? Is it luck when Emergency
FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency
is not reported to top government officials on
a timely basis?

“Please explain why you remained at the
Sarasota, Florida, Elementary School for a
press conference after you had finished listening to the children read, when as a terrorist target, your presence potentially jeopardized the lives of the children?”
Bush, his staff
and his Secret
S e r v i c e
entourage did
indeed pay a
visit to the
B o o k e r
Elementary
George W. Bush at Booker
School, as carElementary
ried on live television until 9:34 a.m. This was fifty minutes
after the first plane hit the World Trade
Center and 29 minutes after 9:05, when Bush
was informed of the second plane crash and

“To me luck is something that happens once.
When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck. If at
some point we don't look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs
properly then how can we ever expect for terrorists not to get lucky again?”
Since Kleinberg’s testimony the commission
has avoided almost any public treatment of
the issues she raised.
For a transcript of Kleinberg’s comments, see
2

In the days before 9/11, unknown traders bought unusually high “put options” in the stock of United Airlines,
American Airlines, and the WTC tenants and reinsurers. This meant that the traders expected the prices of
these equities to plunge in the short term. The volumes of the purchases may have activated a known CIA
real-time tracing program designed to discover suspicious trades (PROMIS). The FBI later claimed it had
determined the identities of the traders in the U.S., but says they are in the clear and declines to name
them. Many of the known trades were transacted through A.B. Brown. The chairman of that bank, Mayo
Shattuck, resigned suddenly on September 12. In the case of one trade, the buyer left $2.5 million
uncollected for months after the attacks. Financial authorities in Frankfurt and Tokyo and an intelligence
bureau in Israel also reported suspicious trades and initially characterized these as smoking guns that
would lead back to the masterminds of 9/11. To our knowledge there has been no public follow-up to these
statements since. In London, authorities said they traced the trades back to an unnamed “small airline” that
was pursuing a “hedging strategy” (IHT, 9/20/01).

3

told, “America is under attack.” After the
well-known moment, when his chief of staff
whispered into his ear, Bush continued listening to the children read. He remained in the
classroom for about 13 minutes. He then prepared and delivered a brief speech to the
nation from the school, calling for a moment
of silence for the WTC victims at 9:31.

Bush listened to “A Girl and Her Pet Goat”?
Was there no concern that the school itself
would be a target, since it was public knowledge, days in advance, that the president
would be there?

The Pentagon was hit at 9:38.

The family leaders have released a series of
strongly worded statements blasting the Bush
administration for stonewalling the 9/11
investigation. But they have been equally
harsh in chastising the Kean Commission for
its refusal to examine key evidence. They
have called for the immediate resignation of
Philip Zelikow, executive director of the
commission, pointing to his various conflicts
of interest. (See “The Rice/Zelikow
Connection,” p. 6)

Courage to Ask the Obvious

The White House has never explained this
anomaly. Instead, Bush has twice claimed, in
speeches made available on the White House
website, that he thought the first plane crash
(at 8:46 a.m.) was an accident. On hearing
news of the crash at 8:55, he says he thought,
“That’s one lousy pilot.” Yet the Federal
Aviation Administration was aware, since
8:20 at the latest, that American Airlines
Flight 11 had been hijacked. The North
American Air Defense Command (NORAD)
was also informed of the hijacking.

The relatives have shown no reluctance to
pursue controversial lines of inquiry in public. It is hard to imagine the commission asking if the Bush administration tried to cut a
deal with Osama Bin Laden in advance of the
9/11 attacks, as reported in the European
press back in the autumn of 2001.

The family leaders have
released a series of strongly
worded statements blasting the
Bush administration for
stonewalling the 9/11 investigation. But they have been equally harsh in chastising the Kean
Commission for its refusal to
examine key evidence.

But the families want an answer: “Did you or
any agent of the United States government
carry out any negotiations or talks with UBL,
an agent of UBL, or al-Qaeda?”
(“UBL” is government speak for Osama Bin Laden.)

The Commission has shown no inclination to
follow the trail of the Cheney “energy policy
meetings” of early 2001, or the Bush administration's oil-pipeline talks with the Taliban
up to July 2001. These touchy subjects might
arise if they ever considered this question:

And by 8:55 a.m. or shortly after, two additional hijackings were known to be in
progress. In the White House, Dick Cheney is
known to have by then been on an open line
connecting FAA, NORAD and the Secret
Service. Yet as the attacks went on, the reaction times of U.S. air defense apparently
became worse.

“During that same period, did you or any agent
of the United States government carry out any
negotiations or talks with any foreign government, its agents, or officials regarding UBL?”
Would the Kean Commission ever wonder out
loud if anyone other than Al-Qaeda (or other
foreigners) gained anything from the attacks?

Was no one telling the president all this? Who
was acting as commander-in-chief, while
4

The families are not afraid to confront this
obvious concern:

Conspiracy Theory?
It is hard to dismiss these concerns as “conspiracy theory” when many Bush administration officials used the most outrageous conspiracy theory of all—the legend that Saddam
backed the 9/11 attacks—as pretext for invading Iraq. In that matter as well, the families
want government held accountable:

“Which individuals, governments, agencies,
institutions, or groups may have benefited from
the attacks of 9/11?”
Although the Kean Commission accepted a
deal strictly limiting its access to White House
documents concerning advance warnings of a
possible terror attack, Kean claimed repeatedly
that there is “no smoking gun” to indicate Bush
had specific prior knowledge of the attacks. At
least, not in the "parts of the documents" Kean
has actually been allowed to see.

“Do you continue to maintain that Saddam
Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda? What proof
do you have of any connection between alQaeda and the Hussein regime?”
Bush in the meantime has admitted there was
no such connection. But Cheney and members of his circle still say there was.

The families don't buy that on faith, or on partial evidence. They want specifics:

9/11 was used as a lever to
shift the globe. All
Americans–and, given the
global impact, the people
of the world–need to learn
the answers that the
families demand.

“As Commander-in-Chief, from May 1, 2001
until September 11, 2001, did you receive any
information from any intelligence agency official or agent that UBL was planning to attack
this nation on its own soil using airplanes as
weapons, targeting New York City landmarks
during the week of September 11, 2001 or on
the actual day of September 11, 2001?”
Carefully researched, the families’ questions
reflect concerns that have caused millions to
doubt the official story—and to call for a truly
independent investigation: One with subpeona
power, testimony under oath, no self-imposed
restrictions on allowable lines of inquiry, and a
published, uncensored final report.
“Even now we are dealing with the idea of
how the [commission] report is going to
be, when it's released,” says Beverly
Eckert of the FSC. “The classification
process is done by the White House and
the intelligence agencies. They are the
ones. They are a subject of this report.
How can they not have a conflict in classifying and editing it? They can edit at will.”

The FSC questions show that, though their
grief and tragedy is great, the families have
understood the stakes in the 9/11 disclosure
issue are even greater. Getting the truth of
9/11 means more than justice for the victims.
And well-deserved closure for their relatives.
9/11 was used as a lever to shift the globe. All
Americans–and, given the global impact, the
people of the world–need to learn the answers
that the families demand.
The Sept. 11 family statements, and their lists of
questions to a variety of administration members, have been published at the FSC's website:
www.911independentcommission.org

5

THE 9/11 COVER-UP

MAY 18, 2004

The Rice/Zelikow Connection
A brief history of the Kean Commission and its conflicts of interest

Rice & Zelikow

2001, when he took part in White House
meetings on the terror threat. Since this was
of interest to the 9/11 investigation, the Kean
Commission recently called Zelikow as a witness, in a closed-door session.

Condoleeza Rice
is a household
name. But most
Americans
still
have never heard
of the man who
wrote a book with
her,
Philip
Zelikow.

Now imagine if the judge in a trial was a
close associate of the star witness. Imagine if
the judge called himself as a witness to the
case, in secret testimony. A parallel situation
has arisen, with Zelikow in the role of the
judge, and Rice as the star witness.

As the executive director of the Kean
Commission, Zelikow is responsible for
framing the agenda. He leads the research
staff. He decides what evidence the commission sees.

Even after September 11, two days before the
invasion of Afghanistan, Zelikow went back
to work for the Bush national security staff,
as a member of the White House advisory
board on foreign intelligence.

In April, the world media focused on Rice’s
appearance before the commission. She
claimed, not for the first time, that no one
could have imagined terrorists would use
hijacked planes as weapons against buildings.
This is a demonstrable falsehood, which
Bush himself inadvertantly exposed a week
later. (See “Bush, Rice and the Genoa
Warning,” p. 15)

Zelikow’s evident conflicts of interest
prompted September 11 family leaders to call
for his resignation months ago. “It is apparent
that Dr. Zelikow should never have been permitted to be Executive Staff Director of the
Commission,”
the
Family
Steering
Committee concluded in a March 20 statement. So far, the commission has ignored
their plea.

Rice’s testimony received mostly bad
reviews. The commission was credited with
investigative fervor. Few reports bothered to
note that in the late 1980s, Rice and Zelikow
worked closely together on George H.W.
Bush’s national security staff.

The Rice/Zelikow connection should have set
off alarm bells about the Kean Commission’s
independence. Yet it has barely caused a stir.

Zelikow and Rice co-authored a 1999 book
about their experiences in the first Bush
White House, “Germany Unified and Europe
Transformed: A Study in Statecraft.” The
book presents “a detailed and fascinating
account of behind-the-scenes discussions and
deliberations” during the fall of the Soviet
empire, according to Library Journal.

The Kissinger Commission

Zelikow again served alongside Rice as a
member of the Bush transition team in 2000-

Henry Kissinger
6

“When we first envisioned this commission,
we did not envision it
made up of ex-senators
and ex-Navy secretaries
and all of this other stuff,”
says Beverly Eckert of the
Family
Steering

Committee. “We thought it should be professors and writers, scholars and also people
who are involved in the news, but not necessarily a part of it. These people [the commissioners] are all a part of it. In many ways
the government is part of the problem.”

New Jersey to Afghanistan
Before taking his current
position, Thomas Kean
was a director and part
owner of Amerada Hess, a
company that maintained a
partnership with Delta Oil
of Saudi Arabia. Since that
Thomas Kean
is the home country for
most of the alleged 9/11
hijackers, and since the Bush family has
close business ties to Saudi elites, many
people would think that this is already a
serious conflict of interest.

By a hair’s breadth, what we know now as the
Kean Commission almost went down in history as the “Kissinger Commission.” Soon
after assenting to an independent investigation, George W. Bush kicked it off in Nov.
2002 by appointing Henry Kissinger to chair
the panel.
Two weeks later, Kissinger declined the
appointment. The families and a few of the
legislators designing the commission had
asked him to rule out possible conflicts of
interest involving his consulting firm,
Kissinger Associates. Kissinger refused to
name his clients, even confidentially. In a letter to Bush, he opined that service to country
would ruin his business.

Together with UNOCAL, Delta Oil in the
mid-1990s began negotiating deals with
Central Asian governments, looking to
acquire pipeline rights out of the world's richest remaining store of undeveloped oil fields.
The favored plan was to get the oil to a port
in Pakistan - meaning, through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The Taliban were courted in the late 1990s by a number of American
oil projects, including UNOCAL’s. But their
hardline behavior ruined their international
image, and the companies backed off.

During the two weeks of Kissinger’s
appointment, the Internet and alternative
press buzzed at the thought of a 9/11 investigation headed by Richard Nixon’s former
secretary of state, a known practitioner of
the strategic lie. Kissinger remains an elder
adviser to many of the key people in the
administration and U.S. defense establishment, especially the neoconservative group
at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld. He
is under investigation in several countries
for alleged involvement in Nixon-era
crimes against humanity in Chile, Indochina
and elsewhere. During a Paris hotel stay in
2001, he received a surprise visit for questioning by a French magistrate, and had to
quietly slip out of the country.

When the Bush administration came to power
in 2001, it opened new pipeline negotiations
with the the Taliban. Despite awards to
Afghanistan of $143 million in U.S. aid in the
first half of 2001, the Taliban refused to
accept the U.S. proposal of a joint government with the Northern Alliance. They broke
off the back-channel Berlin talks in June. At
the time, a U.S. representative promised that
the Taliban had a choice between “a carpet of
gold or a carpet of bombs.”
The White House has admitted that documents placed on Bush’s desk on Sept. 9, 2001
detailed a plan for attacking Afghanistan by
mid-Oct. 2001. Significant deployments to
the region of U.S. and British forces were
already underway. All that was missing for an
invasion was the casus belli - the cause for
hostilities. That arrived two days later, in
New York, in the form of the 9/11 attacks.

The failed Kissinger appointment was a global public relations disaster, but perhaps the
administration felt it needed a cover-up artist
of his caliber. Soon after his departure, the
job of heading the 9/11 Commission went to
Kean, a less controversial figure who was
more willing to reveal his business connections. One of these is worthy of a brief detour.
7

dozens to comb through millions of documents. Only after months of wrangling did
the White House give in to an additional $8
million in funding.1

The subsequent U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan
installed Hamid Karzai as
prime
minister
and
Zalmay Khalilzad as the
powerful White House
envoy
to
Kabul.
Interestingly, both men
Hamid Karzai
were previously employed
as consultants by UNOCAL. The new Afghan
government has since entered a pipeline consortium. UNOCAL is not known to be
involved, but is seen within the industry as
the likely ultimate beneficiary of a future
pipeline.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans
and the White House set out to apportion the
seats in what was termed a bipartisan manner,
meaning five for each party.
Kean's vice-chair, Lee
Hamilton, was the chairman in the 1980s of the
House Select Committee
on
Iran/Contra.
Afterwards, he told PBS
Frontline that he didn't
wish to indict Reagan or
Lee Hamilton
Bush, because he didn't
think it would be “good for the country,”
although a wealth of evidence showed that
Reagan and Bush authorized illegal arms
shipments to Iran in 1985. Then Chairman
Hamilton, a Democrat, was influenced by
heavy political pressure from a hawkish fellow congressman from Wyoming by the
name of Dick Cheney.

In other words, 9/11 became the reason for an
already-planned war in Afghanistan, as a
result of which a long-delayed Afghan
pipeline deal was struck. Given that context,
the appointment as commission chair of an
any oil company director - let alone the director of one involved in a Central Asian
pipeline consortium - appears improper.
But within the commission, Gov. Kean’s
involvement is by no means exceptional. A
look at the member resumes shows that
almost all of them have had business ties to
oil companies - or else, airlines.

The New York Post and FOX NEWS have yet
to report any of the above details concerning
Zelikow, Kean or Hamilton, but in April they
devoted much energy to exposing commission member Jamie Gorelick, who served on
Bill Clinton’s national security staff. The
Murdoch media and Republican politicians
have said she is too partisan to serve on the
commission, and urged that she resign.

Pipelines and Airlines
After Kean’s appointment, the White House
shifted from resisting the very idea of an
investigation to the more mundane matter of
obstructing it. Although the commissioners
were all government and national security
insiders, getting security clearances took
months. For most of the first year, the White
House claimed executive privilege in withholding access to the Presidential Daily
Briefings. The rules were fashioned so that
issuing a subpeona required a majority vote.

In May 2003, shortly after
joining
the
Kean
Commission, Gorelick
also
joined
the
Washington
firm
of
Wilmer,
Cutler
&
Pickering. A month earlier, this firm announced it
Jamie Gorelick
would defend Saudi
Prince Mohammed al Faisal, third in command in the Saudi government–and a plaintiff

Bush initially approved a budget of just $3
million for the panel, which requires a staff of
1

By comparison, the Columbia Space Shuttle explosion led to immediate approval of $30 million for a
commission within a week. The investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual affairs in the 1990s took up on the
order of $40 million in funds.

8

in several of the billion-dollar lawsuits filed
by relatives of 9/11 victims.

million for federal lobbying efforts on behalf
of American Airlines—one of the two carriers
potentially liable for negligence on 9/11.

Richard Ben-Veniste, former Clinton White House
lawyer, was a partner until
February 2003 in one of
the biggest bankruptcy
firms in the world, Weil,
Gotshal, and Manges. As
the N.Y. Post disclosed, the
R. Ben-Veniste
firm received a famously
inflated $3 million retainer from Enron, when
the latter filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

Commission Cuts Deal with White
House
Under a deal the Kean Commission made
with the White House in Nov. 2003, Jamie
Gorelick is the only commissioner–alongside
Executive Director Philip Zelikow– allowed
to view White House documents, such as the
famous Presidential Daily Briefing entitled
“BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE
IN U.S.”

Former Republican Sen.
Slade Gorton is a lawyer
in the Seattle firm of
Preston, Gates and Ellis,
which counts among its
clients both Delta Air
Lines and the Boeing
Employees’ Credit Union.
Slade Gorton
Is either of them likely to
want the airlines forced to pay off lawsuits
from September 11 relatives?

That document (of which the government
recently published 1 1/2 pages out of 11) was
delivered from George Tenet to George Bush
on Aug. 6, 2001. Gorelick is a long-standing
Tenet associate and an adviser to the CIA. Once
again, the investigator is on the friendliest
terms with the subject of the investigation.
While viewing White House documents, she
and Zelikow are allowed to take notes, which
remain with the White House. They then
report to the other commission members. At
one point, the White House withheld the
notes. The commission was said to be debating a subpoena for its own notes, instead of
the actual documents.

While Henry Kissinger did
not make the cut, he does
have close ties to
Republican John Lehman,
whom he recruited for his
staff during the Nixon
administration. Lehman,
the secretary of the Navy
John Lehman
under the Reagan administration, is also close to several members of
the current Bush government. Along with
Kean, Hamilton, and Gorelick, he is a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Max Cleland Drops Out
Max Cleland, the former
Democratic Senator from
Georgia, objected strenuously to the deal restricting access to White
House documents. In the
course of autumn 2003,
he issued a challenge to
Max Cleland
both the White House and
his fellow members of the Kean
Commission.
“Bush is scamming
America,” Cleland declared.

As for former Illinois
Governor
James
R.
Thompson, it really takes
no rocket science to figure
out his conflict of interest.
He is chairman of the
Winston & Strawn law
James R. Thompson firm in Chicago. From
Jan. 1997 through June
2002, Thompson’s law firm received $1.66

“As each day goes by, we learn that this
government knew a whole lot more about
these terrorists before September 11 than
9

it has ever admitted,” Cleland told the
New York Times (10/26/03).
“Let’s chase this rabbit into the ground here,”
Cleland said in an interview. (Salon, November
2003) “They had a plan to go to war, and when
9/11 happened that's what they did. They went
to war.” He called this “a national scandal.”

insider, and who has a clear incentive to seek
the truth? A well-known FSC member
expressed her willingness to serve. Calls and
faxes advocating her nomination poured in
from around the country to the offices of
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. He had
nominated Cleland, and therefore got to
choose the replacement.

Cleland compared the Kean Commission to
the earlier investigation of the Kennedy
Assassination. “The Warren Commission
blew it. I’m not going to be part of that. I’m
not going to be part of looking at information
only partially. I’m not going to be part of just
coming to quick conclusions. I’m not going
to be part of political pressure to do this or not
do that.”

At the commission’s next public session on
December 8, 2003, Cleland went unmentioned until the closing press conference,
when a reporter asked Kean and Hamilton
how they intended to restore the commission’s credibility. Both proclaimed, needlessly, that Cleland was a man of integrity, without addressing anything he had said.

At the time of Cleland’s impassioned outbursts, the hearings were not even covering
September 11, but issues of Homeland
Security. The commission was barely a blip
on the media radar. Aside from the Salon
interview, Cleland’s revolt was treated to cursory coverage in a total of two other outlets:
the Times and the Washington Post. In the
midst of an apparent news black-out, followers of the commission process were not even
sure if Cleland had resigned.

In addition, confronted with open-source evidence of U.S. military preparations for the
9/11 scenario prior to September 11 (the
Pentagon MASCAL exercise, see p. 11), they
gave their usual answer, which can be
summed up as follows: “We are grateful.
Please provide us with these materials. We
will pursue all leads.” The materials were
duly provided.
The next day, Daschle filled the vacancy with
former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, president of The New School University and an
outspoken hardliner on homeland security
issues. (Kerrey was also a member of the
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which
lobbied foreign countries to support the ousting of Saddam Hussein.) The decision had
been made. The 9/11 Commission had room
for no one but insiders.

In December, Bush stepped in and settled the
question. He appointed Cleland to direct the
U.S. Export-Import Bank. Cleland accepted,
and left the Commission.

Ignoring the Elephant
Max Cleland’s departure exposed the commission’s conflicts of interest and willingness
to compromise its mission. Despite reports of
turmoil behind the scenes, the public consequences approached nil.

Leaving aside the behind-the-scenes stories
and conflicts of interest we have detailed,
does the commission truly pursue all leads?
In the next article, a case study of how the
commission operates in public, we shall see
what happened when its members had a golden opportunity to ask top Pentagon officials
about the wargames of September 11.

Yet it was also a chance for the panel to
change course, to address the issues he raised.
Activists launched a campaign to nominate a
member of the Family Steering Committee to
fill the vacancy. Did the commission have
room for one person who is not a government
10

THE 9/11 COVER-UP

MAY 18, 2004

The Total Failure Of the Kean
Commission
Case study: How the Commission went easy on Rumsfeld, Myers and Wolfowitz
By Michael Kane

March 27, 2004

“I had no idea hijacked airliners would be
used as weapons.”

while the National Reconnaissance Office
(NRO) was running a drill for the scenario of
an errant aircraft crashing into a government
building, at the exact same time as an identical scenario was perpetrated in reality. The Air
Force was in day two of annual drills testing
all of its systems to respond to various threats.

So said Rumsfeld, in his
opening remarks to the
Kean Commission on
March 23, 2004. His final
statement on the topic
while under oath was, “I
plead ignorance.”

What role, if any, did Secretary Rumsfeld,
Undersecretary Wolfowitz, and acting Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers play
in any war game scenario on the morning of
September 11, 2001? What briefings did they
receive about these wargames before, during,
and after the morning in question?

Donald Rumsfeld

Former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke’s testimony,
one day later, was interesting, but amounted
to little more than a distraction. There were
more cameras on Clarke than on anyone else
during the two-day national broadcast of the
commission hearings. In reality, his testimony was nowhere near as interesting as the
joint appearance by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Myers the day before.
I do not question Clarke’s sincerity at this
time, just the timing, which he did not
choose. His book was released at a time chosen by the White House, and the testimony
depended on the book. He had finished it well
over 6 months before, but it was held up by
the White House security clearance.

ISSUE #2 – On
October 24, 2000,
a mass casualty
(MASCAL)
emergency drill
was conducted to
test
the
Pentagon’s
response to an
airliner crashing
into its headquarters. In the situaPentagon Mass Casualty
tion room, a
Exercise - Oct. 24, 2000
model plane was
set aflame within a scale model of the
building, while emergency crews were dispatched to various places around the real
building to test their response times. A military web site later published news of the
exercise, with pictures. What did then
Defense Secretary William Cohen tell his
successor, Rumsfeld, about this drill during
the transition process from the Clinton to
Bush administrations?

As a result, the book came out on the eve of
Rumsfeld's sworn testimony to the 9/11
Commission. Very clever if intentional,
because it distracted everyone from two
issues completely ignored by the commissioners, and overshadowed by Clarke and his
book when they questioned Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
ISSUE #1 – On the morning of September 11,
2001, NORAD was running war games
involving the scenario of hijacked airliners,
11

the president issued it. (This was in contradiction to his testimony before the Senate
of 9/13/01 - see p. 12)
GORELICK: Was it your understanding that
the NORAD pilots who were circling over
Washington D.C. that morning had indeed
received a shoot-down order?

Now how is it possible these two questions
were “overlooked”?

Cover-Up Commission – Skillful
Delusion
Richard Ben-Veniste grilled Rumsfeld on the
well-known threat of aircraft being used as
weapons. In his long list of precedents for
hijacked aircraft and attempted kamikaze
attacks, Ben-Veniste conveniently left out the
Oct 24, 2000 drill directly involving the
Pentagon. (It should be noted that BenVeniste was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s
Senate-appointed lawyer during Whitewater,
as well as the attorney for Barry Seal, who
use to fly cocaine from Honduras up to the
Contra supply base at Mena, Arkansas while
Bill Clinton was governor.)

RUMSFELD: When I arrived in the command center, one of the first things I heard,
and I was with you, was that the order had
been given and that the pilots—correction,
not the pilots necessarily, but the command
had been given the instructions that their
pilots could, in fact, use their weapons to
shoot down commercial airliners filled with
our people in the event that the aircraft
appeared to be behaving in a threatening way
and an unresponsive way.

Officials at NORAD have
said that when the hijackings
first occurred, they initially
thought it was part of the
Vigilant Guardian drills running that morning. Despite
some confusion, once Flight
11 struck the World Trade
Center at 8:45 a.m., everyone
should have known this was
not a test.

Of extreme interest was CIA adviser Jamie
Gorelick’s question to Rumsfeld, following
on Ben-Veniste’s line of questioning. She
recalled being in a room with Wolfowitz,
planning for the possibility of terrorists
hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the
Olympics. She found it incomprehensible
that the possibility of this happening at the
Pentagon had never occurred to either
Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld.
But Gorelick also mentioned nothing about the
October 24, 2000 drill at the Pentagon itself.
She went on to ask specific questions about
when an order to authorize fighter pilots to
shoot down aircraft was issued on the morning
of September 11. Rumsfeld complicated and
confused the question by shifting the focus to
later in the day and describing how the events
of the day modified the
rules of engagement.

Richard B. Myers

GORELICK: Now, you make a distinction
there between the command and the pilots.
Was it your understanding that the pilots had
received that order?
RUMSFELD: I’m trying to get in time
because...

General Myers clarified
by stating that, to the best
of his recollection, the
shoot-down order was
communicated directly to
the pilots shortly after

MYERS: Well, I think—my understanding,
I've talked to General Eberhart, commander
now [sic] of NORAD, and I think he’s briefed
the staff. And I think what he told the staff,
what he told me, as I recall, was that the pilots
12

drills running that morning. Despite some
confusion, once Flight 11 struck the World
Trade Center at 8:45 a.m., everyone should
have known this was not a test. However, this
is still an assumption, because we do not
know what the fighter jocks in the air at the
time knew and did not know. We do not know
the full extent of the orders they received, and
it has never been explained why scrambled
fighters were unable to intercept any of the
hijacked airliners.

did—at the appropriate point when the
authority to engage civilian airliners was
given, that the pilots knew that fairly quickly.
I mean, it went down through the chain of
command. (...)
RUMSFELD: (...) The reason I am hesitant is
because we went through two or three iterations of the rules of engagement. And in the
end, we ended up delegating that authority to,
at the lowest level, I believe, to two stars.

Scrambling aircraft simply means providing
an Air Force escort to survey the situation.
This has nothing to do with shooting down an
aircraft. Such scrambling procedures occurred
67 times in the year prior to 9/11. The concept
of this simple standard operating procedure
failing from 8:28 a.m., when Flight 11 made an
unplanned 100 degree turn to the south, until
9:38 a.m., when the Pentagon was struck, is
inconceivable without a military order. Such
an order, or multiple orders causing ‘confusion’, may have been scripted into the war
game scenarios that morning. We do not know
if this is the case, and it seems the Kean
Commission doesn’t want to know, either.

MYERS: Right.
RUMSFELD: And the pilot would then
describe the situation to that level. To the
extent that level had time, they would come
up to General Eberhart. To the extent
Eberhart had time, he would come up to me.
And to the extent I had time, I might talk to
the president, which in fact, I did do on several occasions during the remainder of the
day with respect to international flights heading to this country that were squawking
“hijack.”
GORELICK: I’m just trying to understand
whether it is your understanding that the
NORAD pilots themselves, who were circling over Washington, as you referred to in
your statement, whether they knew that they
had authority to shoot down a plane (...)

It is possible that information regarding the
war games running on the morning of 9/11
has been classified and cannot be discussed in
public hearings. Considering the fact that the
information provided here is open source and
has been published by the likes of Jane’s
Defense Weekly and the Associated Press,
classifying the subject as a whole does not in
any way help national security. If we do not
face what really happened that morning, our
national security is truly in jeopardy.

RUMSFELD: I do not know what they
thought. In fact, I haven’t talked to any of the
pilots that were up there. I certainly was
immediately concerned that we did know
what they thought they could do.
At first glance this seems like semantics, but
in the context of what was really happening
that day it may be quite significant. Whether
or not a pilot has a shoot-down order directly
communicated to him is of the highest significance given the fact that the pilot may not
have known if he was still in one of the war
games scheduled for that day.

What was Rumsfeld doing on
September 11?
In the past, Rumsfeld has gone on record saying that on the morning of September 11, he
was in the Pentagon giving a lecture to members of Congress. He warned them to “expect
the unexpected” with future terrorist attacks.
Shortly thereafter, he was handed a note stating
that the North Tower had been struck. Soon

Officials at NORAD have said that when the
hijackings first occurred, they initially
thought it was part of the Vigilant Guardian
13

Harbor” in a favorable light (in September
2000).

after that, he was told the second tower was hit.
Rumsfeld claimed he continued with his lecture until the Pentagon was struck, at 9:38.
This makes absolutely no sense. If the
Secretary of Defense is lecturing to a
Congressional delegation about the danger of
surprise terrorist attacks, and if in the middle
of that he is told two planes have hit both
World Trade Center towers, it is beyond belief
that he continues his presentation without
reacting to the ‘unexpected’ terrorist attack.

Donald Rumsfeld was a signatory to the
PNAC mission statement, along with administration stalwarts Dick Cheney, John
Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich and
Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as Jeb Bush. For
all of them, the Project for a New American
Century amounts to a kind of public oath. The
mission statement and the entire PNAC plan
were published on the web at newamericancentury.org, years before the Bush administration came to power.

The fact that not one member of the Kean
Commission chose to scrutinize Rumsfeld’s
well-known statements speaks volumes.

Since all of this information is open source,
how is it that the commission managed to
entirely ignore it when they questioned
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Myers?

Willful Reckless Wanton or Treason?
The Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), a non-profit organization founded
in 1997 by prominent Republican leaders,
called for a transformation of America to
exercise military total spectrum dominance
and unchallenged worldwide hegemony.
The PNAC program, in a nutshell:
America’s military must rule out even the
possibility of a serious global or regional
challenger anywhere in the world. The
regime of Saddam Hussein must be toppled
immediately, by U.S. force if necessary.
And the entire Middle East must be reordered according to an American plan.
PNAC’s most important study notes that
selling this plan to the American people will
likely take a long time, “absent some catastrophic catalyzing event – like a new Pearl
Harbor.” (PNAC, Rebuilding America’s
Defenses (1997), p.51)

Curious Evidence
The State Department in September 2001
promised a paper to prove the guilt of Bin
Laden. It was never published. Why? British
premier Tony Blair instead provided a weak
circumstantial case in his White Paper a
few weeks later. The State Department did,
however, provide a misleading translation
to make it appear that Bin Laden (or someone who looks like him) confessed to 9/11
in a November 2001 video, which was
found under suspicious circumstances in
Afghanistan. (ARD-TV, Germany)
Meanwhile, the FBI announced one of the
flight hijacker s passports was discovered in
the Ground Zero rubble, on September 11
itself. A search of a Florida motel room
where two hijackers stayed two weeks earlier yielded incriminating documents that
they forgot there, and which had not been
found by the cleaning personnel. These are
only two examples of the investigators
incredible lucky streak.
Yet how do these stories square with the
admission, seven months later, by FBI
Director Robert Mueller that, In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single
piece of paper either here in the United
States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and
elsewhere that mentioned any aspect of
the September 11 plot." (San Francisco
speech, 4/19/2002)

A catalyzing catastrophe
did come, and since
September 11 the policies
that PNAC promoted
have been put in place by
PNAC’s own members.
They occupy nearly all of
Paul Wolfowitz
the key positions in the
Bush administration national security apparatus. Paul Wolfowitz, who was under oath
alongside Rumsfeld at the March 23 testimony, signed on to the PNAC document
which specifically referred to a “new Pearl
14

THE 9/11 COVER-UP

MAY 18, 2004

Bush, Rice and the Genoa Warning
Documenting a demonstrable falsehood
with anti-aircraft batteries.

“I don't think anybody could have predicted
that these people would take an airplane and
slam it into the World Trade Center, take
another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that
they would try to use an airplane as a missile,
a hijacked airplane as a missile.”
–Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002

March 2001:
In the pilot episode of a short-lived TV series,
“The Lone Gunmen,” the heroes narrowly
avert the crashing of a remote-hijacked passenger plane into the WTC North Tower. This
shows that even TV writers are speculating
that someone could crash a hijacked plane into
the Twin Towers.

Late 1980s, throughout the 1990s:
The idea of using hijacked planes as weapons
against buildings becomes common. There are
attempted kamikaze attacks involving hijacked
planes in Israel (1986), Turkey (1993) and
France (1994). A suicide Cessna pilot hits the
White House on Sept. 12, 1994. Tom Clancy
publishes a novel in which the villain crashes
an airliner into the Capitol (1994). Pentagon
scenario planners bring up the possibility of a
kamikaze-hijacking in a variety of reports
(twice in 1993; 1999; 2000).

April 2001:
According to news stories of 4/13/04, the Defense
Department considers holding yet another live
exercise to rehearse for the contingency of a
hijacked plane crashing into the Pentagon.

Mid-1990s:
News reports and trial cases reveal that Ramzi
Yussef (convicted mastermind of the 1993
World Trade Center bombing) devised
“Project Bojinka,” a plot including the idea of
crashing hijacked airliners into American targets. Foreign and U.S. intelligence and defense
agencies issue warnings and devise defense
scenarios relating to the possibility that something like “Project Bojinka” can be attempted
anywhere, at any time.

June 2001:
The mass media warn that Osama Bin Laden is
preparing to strike again. Sources report he has
new and outlandish “Hollywood” ideas, like
crashing a plane loaded with explosives into
George W. Bush’s hotel at the July 2001
Summit of G-8 nations in Genoa, Italy. TIME
Magazine: “According to German intelligence
sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying
German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled
model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens. (Paging Jerry
Bruckheimer…)” TIME also writes, “If Bin
Laden didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”

October 2000:
The Department of Defense responds competently to these developments, by rehearsing a
MASCAL (mass casualty) exercise based on
the scenario of a plane crashing into the
Pentagon. The live exercise of Oct. 24, 2000
involves rescue crews directed from a command center. A paper plane is set aflame within a scale model of the building. A military
news-site later publishes an article about it.
NOTE: The Pentagon is known to be ringed

July 3, 2001:
Bush biographer Jim Hatfield picks up on the
“Genoa Warning.” In an article for Online
Journal, he jokes: “Why would Osama want to
kill his business partner?” He exposes a few
facts about the Bush-Bin Ladin family business
connections (The Carlyle Group) and about the
CIA’s historic relationship with Al-Qaeda.
Hatfield guesses that the CIA itself is spreading
the Genoa rumor, in an effort to pump up
Bush's sagging popularity. (July 18, 2001: Jim
15

Hatfield’s death in Arkansas ruled a suicide.)

tion is: “Is this part of the exercise?”
(Aviation Weekly, September 2002)

July 20, 2001:
G-8 Summit opens. Italy, citing the air-attack
warnings, closes Genoa International Airport
and installs anti-aircraft batteries around the G8 Summit locations. The U.S. Secret Service is
apparently not satisfied. For safety, Bush and
his entourage spend at least one night on a U.S.
aircraft carrier. On the same night, Putin,
Schroeder and Chirac carouse with Blair on an
Adriatic cruise ship.
Meanwhile, Genoa is under martial law.
Italian federal stormtroops in Darth Vader costumes enclose entire neighborhoods with milelong, barbed-wire fences. Hooded undercover
agents roam in the guise of “black-bloc” protesters. They start riots and then retreat behind
federal Italian police lines. This is filmed from
helicopters by the local police of Genoa, who
object to the extreme measures. One protester
is shot dead. (ARD-TV, Germany)

September 27, 2001:
The LA Times reports on the “Genoa
Warning.” Now Italian sources claim they
developed the intelligence themselves.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also says
he warned Bush that Bin Laden wanted to
launch a kamikaze attack on the G-8 Summit.
How did news of the plot circulate among the
intelligence agencies of several countries?
May 15, 2002:
The White House admits the existence of the
August 6 PDB. The New York Post headlines
the news: “Bush Knew.” The next day,
Condoleeza Rice proclaims that “no one could
have imagined” planes would be used as
weapons. She says the warnings to Bush related only to “traditional hijackings,” not
kamikaze attacks.

August 6, 2001:
Bush receives a memorandum from CIA
Director George Tenet entitled, “BIN LADEN
DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S.” This
“Presidential Daily Briefing” or PDB warns of
potential terrorist hijackings in U.S. airspace.
The PDB later becomes the object of a tug of
war between the White House and the Kean
Commission.

March and April, 2004:
In testimony to the Kean Commission, both
Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice once
again insist that no one could have imagined
hijacked planes would be used as weapons
against buildings. Meanwhile, the White House
finally gives in and publishes 1 1/2 pages (out
of 11 total) of the August 6, 2001 PDB. What
does the rest say?

September 11, 2001:
Early in the morning, the U.S. military begins
air defense and mass casualty wargames.
So far, we know definitely of:
1) a NORAD exercise known as “Vigilant
Guardian,” which included hijacking simulations and possibly involved the projection of
false blips onto military radar screens; and
2) an air-crash fire-drill at the National
Reconaissance Office near Washington, four
miles from Dulles Airport. The NRO is the
headquarters of the U.S. satellite surveillance
system, which is run jointly by the CIA and
Pentagon.
Suddenly, the wargames are interrupted by
word that a passenger plane from Logan
Airport really has been hijacked. When the
news arrives at a nearby airbase, the first ques-

April 13, 2004:
At an evening press conference, Bush connects
the “Genoa Warning” (kamikaze attacks) to the
Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6th, 2001
(domestic hijackings).
“And I asked for the briefing [the PDB],” he
says. “And the reason I did is because there had
been a lot of threat intelligence from overseas.
And so, I – part of it had to do with the Genoa
G-8 conference that I was going to attend. And
I asked at that point in time, let's make sure we
are paying attention here at home, as well. And
that's what triggered the report.”
Could “no one have imagined”? Perhaps
inadvertantly, Bush has exposed his own
national security adviser and his Secretary
of Defense as liars.
16

THE 9/11 COVER-UP

Before

the

MAY 18, 2004

Kean

Commission

The cover-up from 9/11 to 2003: An overview
awards, which average $1.8 million per
death, must forego litigation against U.S.
companies or government agencies. At least
50 families are known to have therefore
refused the fund presided over by Kenneth
Feinberg, among them Eckert. “Litigation has
many facets,” she says. “It’s a fact-finding
mechanism, through discovery and depositions. This is not about vengeance. I certainly
do want people to be held accountable... The
Commission unfortunately has taken a very
kid-gloves approach to their fact-finding. A
courtroom is a battleground, and that's what
we need to get to the bottom of everything.”

Ahmad, Tenet, Goss and Graham:
Pakistan’s powerful Interservices Intelligence
Agency (ISI), which in the 1990s created and
trained the Taliban, maintains close ties to
U.S. intelligence. By treaty, the ISI chief is
approved by the CIA. On September 11, that
was Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad. He was in
Washington when the attacks occurred, on a
visit since September 4 to meet with his
counterpart at the CIA, George Tenet, and
other officials. The Wall Street Journal later
reported that ISI provided financing to the
alleged 9/11 hijackers. Indian intelligence
sources said Ahmad directly approved a wire
of $100,000 to Mohamed Atta. On the morning of September 11, Ahmad was at the
Capitol, meeting with the heads of the
Congressional intelligence committees, Sen.
Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss. At the
insistence of the FBI, Ahmad was fired from
his post a month later, as the Pakistani cabinet
was reshuffled on the eve of the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan. Graham and Goss went
on to lead the 2002 Congressional joint
inquiry of 9/11. Their final, 800-page report
makes no mention of Pakistan in any context.
Shouldn’t they—and Tenet—at least explain
what they were doing with Ahmad?

Poisoning New York:
“The collapse of the Twin Towers and the
underground fire emitted the largest concentration ever measured in the U.S. of nanosize,
extremely toxic submicroscopic metals and
superfine particles,” says geoscientist Leuren
Moret (University of Berkeley). But New
Yorkers will remember that in the days after
9/11, EPA chief Christie Whitman felt confident enough to announce that no special precautions were required to protect against the
dust cloud engulfing the city. A new study by
the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine environmental program now details serious health
consequences for rescue workers and babies
born to expectant mothers exposed to the
smoke. This comes as no surprise to the many
thousands of New Yorkers suffering from
persistent “Ground Zero cough.” Why did
Whitman rush to give obviously premature
and reckless reassurances?

The Hush Money Fund:
“The victims fund was not created in a spirit
of compassion,” September 11 family leader
Beverly Eckert wrote in USA Today
(12/19/03). “Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgement by Congress that it tampered with
our civil justice system in an unprecedented
way. Lawmakers capped the liability of the
airlines at the behest of lobbyists who
descended on Washington while the
September 11 fires still smoldered.”
Compensation for victim families under the
government fund is similar to that normally
gained in other sudden-death cases, but one
condition is unprecedented: those who file for

Disposing of Ground Zero:
Michael Manning is the editor of Fire
Engineering, the nation’s oldest and most
important firefighter's magazine. He published a blistering January 2002 editorial criticizing the disposal of evidence at Ground
Zero, in violation of regulations that required
17

a full forensic reconstruction of the tower collapse mechanics. Debris was not kept at the
Staten Island landfill, but shipped straight
to scrap recyclers in China and India. As a
result, scientists today theorize about the
collapse, but they have lost most of the
physical evidence they need to figure out
what actually happened. (In a bizarre twist,
photographers were arrested even for taking
unauthorized photos of the Ground Zero
site during the clean-up.)
Wasn't Ground Zero a crime scene?
One former cop, Frank Serpico, had this to
say: “The mayor of New York, TIME
Magazine’s [2001] Man of the Year, ordered
thousands of tons of WTC steel sold and
melted down before a proper investigation
of the greatest crime scene the country ever
witnessed could be conducted. Something
foul smelling about that.”

The Congressional Joint Inquiry:
Finally, in the spring of 2002, the
Congressional intelligence committees set
out to conduct a joint inquiry of September
11. They hired an executive director, former
CIA official Brit Snider, who was fired after
undisclosed conflicts behind the scenes.
In the summer of 2002, the FBI (a subject
of the investigation) made an unprecedented demand that senators on the panel take
lie-detector tests to trace a leak that was
said to have angered Dick Cheney. It later
turned out that the leak originated with
Cheney's office. However, by then it was
apparently no longer worth investigating.
(John Prados, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientist,
As with the later 9/11 Commission, the
public hearings avoided most of the actual
questions of September 11, and concentrated on homeland security. One exception
was the testimony of New Jersey widow
Kristen Breitweiser which was ignored.
(see “The Kean Commission and the
September 11th Families”, p. 2)
In the end, the inquiry submitted an 800page report (December 2002). It was published six months later, with one-quarter
blacked out—including an entire 28-page
chapter and a glossary item. (!) An appendix by several senators noted that only the
committee chairs actually had access to any
significant evidence during the inquiry.
As for Graham, he told the Washington Post
that the most important facts about Sept.
11—which he implied involved complicity
by more than one U.S. ally—had yet to be
revealed. “But maybe it will all come out in
30 years,” Graham said.

Stonewalling:
When the anthrax attacks began in October
2001, the FBI pulled most of the agents
working on the 9/11 investigation. Months
later, Dick Cheney informed the
“anthraxed” Senate majority leader, Tom
Daschle, that a “shadow government” with
no Congressional input had been activated
on September 11—and was still in operation. In January 2002, Cheney and Bush
pressured Daschle to delay a Congressional
investigation of September 11. That March,
Rep. Cynthia McKinney was castigated
merely for asking who may have known
what in advance of 9/11. The administration’s refusal to give any information about
9/11 began to crack in May, when the White
House admitted receiving an advance warning about domestic hijackings. That story
was buried in a sudden avalanche of FBI
terror warnings originating from an AlQaeda prisoner at Guantanomo, Abu
Zubaydah. (He later confessed he was getting many of his ideas from the film,
“Godzilla.”)

FAA informs NORAD that UA175 has been diverted, according to NORAD (9/18/01).

8:46:26

World Trade Center Building 1 (WTC 1), the North Tower, is struck (AA11).

After 8:46 Open phone line established between White House, Secret Service, FAA and NORAD (FAA, 5/21/03;
Cheney on NBC, 9/16/01).
8:46

AA77 goes severely off course over West Virginia, returns to course after about five minutes (according to
published flight routes). Ground-control contact continues. This has never been explained.

8:50

Last known ground control contact to AA77.

8:52

Two interceptor jets scrambled from Otis Air Force Base (AFB), Massachussetts, on a heading to
New York (NORAD, 9/18/01).

8:56

AA77 transponder turned off. Just prior, flight diverted from route over Kentucky/Ohio border and
heads back toward Washington. Reports conflict: AA77 is lost to radar, reappears later over
Washington DC; or AA77 is lost for a few minutes, then located and tracked all the way back to DC.

8:55

George W. Bush informed of first crash and thinks, “That's one lousy pilot.” (Source: Bush)

9:02:54

World Trade Center Building 2 (WTC 2), the South Tower, is struck (UA175).

9:05

In Florida, Bush is informed of second crash and reportedly told: “America is under attack.”

UA93 crashes in Pennsylvania, according to U.S. Army seismic study.
NOTE: Last 3 minutes of UA93 flight transcript, played to families in 2002, were blank or missing.

10:22

Media report car bomb at State Department. Later called false.

10:29

WTC 1 collapses. Approximately 3,000 people are dead.

10:37

Authorities report plane crash in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

AERIAL ATTACKS END.

19

9/11/01
after 10:00 New York orders evacuation of Lower Manhattan. State of alert in New York and Washington
DC. Evacuations of all federal buildings in United States. Further (false) reports of plane
crashes and hijackings, including in Colorado, Camp David, and crash sites in Pennsylvania
and at Ohio/Kentucky border. Further (false) reports of attacks in Washington. Bush flies to
Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington. U.S. closes borders. Florida declares
statewide emergency. Cape Canaveral, Disneyworld shut down. All sports and entertainment
events cancelled. Callers from Jordan take credit for attacks on behalf of “Japanese Red
Army,” Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. Latter two organizations issue denials of involvement.
Reuters footage of a Palestinian grandmother said to be celebrating attacks in a West Bank
street is played around the world. Bomb threats cause evacuation of Frankfurt Stock
Exchange and grounding of all flights in Saudi Arabia. By evening, Osama bin Laden is
identified as prime suspect. Bush speaks to nation.
4:25 pm

Senate confirmation hearings for Gen. Myers as Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. Myers
says, “to the best of my knowledge,” no order was given to scramble interceptor planes until
after the Pentagon was hit (9:38). NOTE: Elsewhere, Myers stated he went into a Capitol Hill
meeting with Sen. Cleland right after the first crash, and only heard later that this was not
accident—only moments before he was told that the Pentagon had been hit.

9/16/01

On “Meet the Press,” Cheney reveals that FAA, NORAD and other services maintained a
joint line of communication on the morning Sept. 11. He also says, "The toughest decision
was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft."
NOTE: Interception of errant aircraft (not shootdown) is a standard operating procedure,
historically not requiring an order from the upper chain of command.

9/18/01

NORAD releases timeline detailing when it received errant aircraft alerts from FAA and issued
interception orders. Timeline shows interceptor planes were scrambled before 9:38, contradicting
Myers’s testimony to Senate. NOTE: Timeline indicates FAA took up to 27 minutes to inform
NORAD of the AA11 diversion; as little as one minute to inform NORAD of the UA175 diversion;
and at least 34 minutes to inform NORAD of the AA77 diversion. No times are specified for UA93.

5/21/03

FAA issues statement on “FAA Communications with NORAD On September 11, 2001” as a
“clarification” to the Kean Commission: “Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World
Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA
field facilities, the FAA Command Center, FAA headquarters, DOD, the Secret Service, and
other government agencies. The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the
FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD on a separate line. The
FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including
information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unautho
rized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including
Flight 77. Other parties on the phone bridges, in turn, shared information about actions they
were taking. NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American
Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m., but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the
phone bridges before the formal notification.”
NOTE: Transcripts of the above communications are known to exist.
20

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